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INSIDE CS Department of Computer Science SPRING 2007 INSIDE CS Department of Computer Science SPRING 2007 then actively recruiting students we are I also want to congratulate Profs. Ramani especially interested in having attend Duraiswami and Atif Memon who were our program. Prof. Khuller spends an promoted this spring to the rank of As- enormous number of hours each spring sociate Professor and Adam Porter who semester on graduate student recruitment. was promoted to full Professor. With the It culminates in our annual visit day for departure of Heather Murray from our perspective students, and this year we had Graduate Office, we were fortunate to hire a record 30 students visit the campus to Jennifer Story as our Graduate Coordina- meet faculty and students and learn first tor. Jenny has been employed in various hand about our program. positions at the University since 1988. During the last eleven years, she was an Faculty recruiting this year focused on the Assistant Director for the University’s Notes from the Chair recently established Minker Professorship Honors Program. I also want to acknowl- and in the area of computational biology. edge all of those faculty, staff, and students by We were successful in hiring a new junior who participated in the Department’s faculty member in computational biology Awards Ceremony. Pictures from the Prof. Larry Davis (Carl Kingsford, a graduate of Princeton event and a copy of the program can be whose research will be described in our found on the department’s web page. The Spring 2007 semester is over, and fall newsletter), and are continuing our Finally, we want to acknowledge Profes- nearly 100 students received their B.S. de- search for the Minker Professorship. sor Emeritus Jack Minker who will be grees at the College graduation ceremony. celebrating his 80th birthday and 40 years Dr. Ravi Sethi, the CEO of Avaya Labs, A large anonymous gift, donated about a with the Computer Science Department. was the College commencement speaker; year ago to the Gannon fund, allowed us after the ceremony Ravi spent time meet- to significantly expand our undergraduate ing with faculty and graduate students in student scholarship offerings. The income the Department. from that fund is now used both to recruit Student Transportation excellent new students to our program, and While undergraduate enrollments in to reward our very best students for their Design Competition computer science are down nationwide, we outstanding academic performance. We have started to see an increase in new stu- are also using some of the fund’s income dents, thanks, in large part, to the vigorous to support first year graduate students recruiting activities of our undergraduate during the summer while they work on office led by Prof. Purtilo. We believe that research projects with faculty members. our success in recruiting new undergrads is Students were asked to submit propos- also due to the Passport program that Nel- als and a committee selected three of the son Padua-Perez has developed and grown strongest for this first summer. These especially during the past year. This students will give presentations this fall on spring semester we had over 200 middle their work. It is not too late to contribute and high school students come to the cam- to the fund – it really makes a difference pus every Saturday for instruction in com- in recruiting and retaining highly rated puter science at four different levels. Our undergraduate students and providing an department’s undergraduate enrollment is early research component in our graduate still more than twice the median for top program. Clockwise: Martin Stolen, Anna Nhan, Tiffany Gray and John Dobrosielski twenty computer science departments, ac- cording to recent statistics released by the I delivered the first “State of the Depart- Computing Research Association. ment” address in April. It gave me a With the demand on energy resources chance to thank many of the people who increasing as the supply decreases, energy While undergraduate enrollments are have contributed to the department’s costs in the United States have been at an down, applications to our graduate pro- programs, and to bring everyone up to date all-time high. Despite these costs, conges- gram remain at high levels. We had over on department initiatives in research and tion is still steadily increasing. Carpool- 1200 applicants this year for only 35-40 education. The slides from that presenta- ing has for a long time been an option to new graduate student positions. There tion are available on the department’s web help reduce congestion, but commuters is a significant amount of work involved page. currently under use it. The Carpool.UMD in evaluating so many applications, and website prototype started as a term project for CMSC 434 Hu- faculty members receive this honor each year. The award honors man Factors in Computer and Information Systems (http://www. senior faculty who possess a record of outstanding scholarly ac- cs.umd.edu/class/fall2006/cmsc434/), under the supervision of complishment, combined with excellence in teaching. Professor Ben Shneiderman. Samir is internationally recognized for his research in design- It is a social-networking website designed to make carpooling to ing efficient graph theoretic algorithms that can be used to solve and from the University of Maryland, College Park easier. The optimization problems from different areas. Many problems in website allows users to search for carpools, learn more about other this area are NP Hard, so it is important to develop provably gooy riders and manage their carpools. Carpool.UMD aims to create a approximate algorithms for these problems. One of Samir’s most safe and friendly community as well as making it convenient to well known results concerns research on a fundamental network carpool to and from the University. design problem call Light Approximate Shortest Path Trees. This work shows how to obtain a smooth tradeoff between spanning A project paper was entered in the Student Design Competition of tree weight and distance. In addition, the research he conducted on the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2007 Conference held in Connected Dominating sets has been widely used in the wireless San Jose, California (www.chi2007.org). Carpool.UMD was one networking community and formed the basis of ad hoc network of 12 teams, out of 54 teams from around the world (19 different routing methods in wireless systems. schools in 11 countries), that were selected to present a design in the final stage of the competition. The conference took place from Samir is also passionate about teaching. He has worked closely April 28 to May 3, 2007. The team consisted of three Computer with some of our brightest campus and area high school students. Science Seniors; John Dobrosielski, Anna Nhan and Tiffany Gray, Undergraduate students have said that Prof. Khuller “got them as well as one Aerospace Engineering graduate student, Martin excited” about theoretical computer science. He taught them Stolen. about “patience and hard work”. He is seen as a “very enthusiastic researcher” who gives “clear presentations, full of exciting prob- Team members presented their project to an audience on Monday, lems”. He is a “wonderful human being and scholar, an embodi- April 16 in the CSIC Lecture Hall. A reception was held prior to ment of hope, energy and great ideas” and “he has helped us grow their presentation. into something better and beyond ourselves without any sense of effort.” The Departments of Computer Science, Transportation, and Aerospace Engineering provided financial support so that team One of Samir’s students, An Zhu, won the Dorfman Award for Un- members could attend the competition in California. We are all dergraduate Research then attended Stanford where she earned a very proud of the students and wish them success at the Confer- Ph.D degree. An is now with Google. Jessica Chang was selected ence and in their professional careers upon graduation. as a Phillip Merrill Presidential Scholar and identified Samir as one of the teachers that most influenced her. Samir continues to work with high school students from Montgomery Blair. In 2004, Michael Forbes was a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Pro- Professor Samir Khuller gram. This year, Matt McCutchen has conducted some impressive research which he plans to publish next year. Wins Prestigious Samir graduated from The Indian Institute of Technology in Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Kanpur, India in 1986. He received his B. Tech. degree from the Computer Science and Engineering Department and later earned Award his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1990. In 1992, he was ap- pointed an Assistant Professor in the department after spending two years in UMIACS as a postdoctoral scientist. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 1995, a Lilly-CTE Teaching Fellowship in 1997, and the 2003 ACM PODS Best Newcomer Paper Award. He was promoted to full Professor in 2004. Samir’s publishing and department service records are outstanding. Along with his many other contributions, Samir is currently our Associate Chair for Graduate Education. The Department is very proud of Prof. Khuller’s accomplishments and appreciates his hard work, dedication, and commitment to high academic and intellectual standards. No doubt his professo- rial visibility and career will continue to grow. The campus has selected Prof. Samir Khuller to receive a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award for 2006-2007. Only a few CS 2 The Scientific Computing Group equations. The Fast Multipole Algorithm and Applications The motivation for fast multipole algorithms is to develop an efficient algorithm for computing the potential function for a set of charged particles. Dense matrices derived from point distribu- tions of data arise commonly in applications. The fast multipole method can be used to speed up matrix vector products and iterative solvers involving matrices with such structure.
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